12 Facts About Constance Garnett

Constance Clara Garnett was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Constance Garnett was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction into English.

Constance Garnett rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English.

Constance Garnett's brother was the mathematician Arthur Black, and her sister was the labour organiser and novelist Clementina Black.

Constance Garnett's father became paralysed in 1873, and two years later her mother died from a heart attack after lifting him from his chair to his bed.

Constance Garnett was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School.

Constance Garnett introduced her to his fellow exile and colleague Sergius Stepniak and his wife Fanny.

Constance Garnett retired from translating after the publication in 1934 of Three Plays by Turgenev.

Constance Garnett developed a heart condition, with attendant breathlessness, and in her last years had to walk with crutches.

Constance Garnett died at The Cearne, Crockham Hill, Kent, at the age of 84.

However, Constance Garnett has had critics, notably Russian authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky.

Constance Garnett's English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable.